Force and Form-An Essay on the Dialectics of the Living

Force and FormAn Essay on the Dialectics of the Living

Thomas Khurana

Around 1800, the notion of life began to attract an astonishing degree of attention andto attain the status of a fundamental concept. This is not only true of the proto-biologicaldiscourses of this period that strived to articulate a synthetic theory of life under suchtitles as general zoology, organology, or biology1; remarkably enough, it is equallytrue of the philosophy of the time, even if the term Lebensphilosophie has come to designatea distinctly later period of thought. A philosophical notion of life appeared indispensableand fundamental to the emerging aesthetics of the 18th century and the idealist discoursesfollowing Kants Critique of Judgment. They introduced a philosophical object, which, underheadings like living being and natural purpose, lay somewhere in between mere objects,which are intelligible in purely mechanical terms, and self-conscious subjects, who inhabitthe realm of freedom. Compared to the mere objects of dead nature, living beings seem topossess a form of organization and an element of spontaneity reminiscent of the mind. Incomparison with self-conscious subjects, however, the form of order manifested by merelyliving beings nevertheless lacks the full and conscious grasp on itself which is characteristicof the mind.

Life consequently came to be defined as a decisive threshold in the emergence of themind. Thus, life is not accorded such prominence merely on account of being an object ofa certain sort, but because it is the proximate other of the mind and can thereby elucidate theminds structure. The structure of the mind is, at least implicitly, articulated with reference tothis threshold: the living might either appear as a preliminary stage to the order of the mind,and thus define the essential features distinctive of the minds fully constituted form that themerely living lacks; or it might appear as an underlying infrastructure, that remains operativein one way or another in the structure of the mind. I am interested here in the way in whichthe concept of the living as a threshold sheds light on structural features of the mind and inthe way in which the mind itself might appear in these philosophical discourses of modernityto have the mode of a living process. In what follows, I will therefore begin to delineate avery basic trait of this concept of the living: a dialectics of force and form operative in theliving. The following remarks will not deal with a definition of the living as a certain typeof substance or as a class of beings; the living rather figures as a type of process and amode of order in the light of which and against which the order and process of the mind isarticulated.

I. Life as Force, Life as FormIn conceiving of the mind and meaningful practices with reference to the living, one relatesthem to a mode or being that is simultaneously the other of the mind and its most proximateneighbor. Living processes and beings in their materiality, their specific structure and naturaldetermination can appear to be the other of the mind in its free and normative order. At thesame time, however, life is the very process and mode of being that a mind can encounter inthe outer world which most closely approximates its own structure. Machines of nature, as

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Leibniz calls the living beings in order to distinguish them from artificial machines, are theonly entities that possess a form of unity that comes close to what in us is the I.2 In HegelsPhenomenology of Spirit life is the name of the object of consciousness that appears on stageat the turning point, exactly at the moment before consciousness grasps itself in the formof a doubled self-consciousness and gets a glimpse of its own structure as the I that isWe and We that is I.3 In the relation between individual and species, life manifests,according to Hegel, this very structure in itself , though not for itself as it is the case inself-consciousness.

This coincidence of proximity and opposition of life and mind, of living processesand meaningful practices, opens up diverging possibilities of relating mind and life. Onemight presume, on the one hand, that life is the name of the structure that has to be su-perseded and resolved into the structure of mind. On the other hand, one might try toshow that life might be the irreducible infrastructure of meaningful practices. No matterwhich of these strategies one pursues, the content of the respective thesis the remain-ing deficiency or the irreducibility of the living depends on the marks and featuresthat are distinctive of the living. There are two systematic options that present them-selves when one searches for such a structural trait of the living: life as form or life asforce.

On the one hand, it might seem distinctive of living phenomena that they possess form in aneminent sense. Seen from the viewpoint of form, a specific unity and directedness of the livingcomes to the fore: the way in which it reaches and sustains a complex form that possessesa compelling inherent necessity, although it seems in the highest degree contingent,4 ifwe only have recourse to mechanical explanation alone. Living beings seem to manifestthemselves in a specific form that pertains even to their smallest parts, shapes them throughand through and turns them into wholes of a peculiar kind. The elements of the living entityare not parts, properly speaking, but rather moments of an overall and pervasive form. Theliving not only possesses this form, but maintains and even regenerates it when it is harmed orchanged by external influences. The living phenomena are thus considered to be governed bya teleological form that determines the living entity in all its phases, from beginning to end,and in each of its moments. It is essential to this perspective on the character of the living thatit is conceived as realizing itself in the form of a being reproducing its boundaries and forminga unit of its own. The paradigm of this view of the living is, thus, the organized integrity of theorganism.

On the other hand, however, a second systematic intuition suggests itself that seemsopposed to this formal idea of life: living processes as manifestations of force. Seenunder the aspect of force, life can appear, in contrast to the first view, to be marked bya generative and excessive nature. Living processes as such seem to have a generativeproductivity, an openness and undirectedness, that not only generates forms but supercedesand transgresses them in the course of development. In their generative and excessive nature,the living processes seem to exceed law-like realms just as much as rule-governed orders.Living processes generate, transgress, dissolve, and re-generate forms not fully anticipatedby program or prediction and not ordered by pre-given norms that might determine the formsthat actually emerge as proper or improper. Rather than being subject to pre-given norms,living processes seem to be subjects of their own norms they are themselves, to use GeorgesCanguilhems expression, normative.5 From the viewpoint of force, the living seems tobe marked by a transgressive character. It seems to possess the quality of being somethingunpredictable or unforeseeable, to employ a remark of Wittgensteins.6 From this angle,one might think of a living process as something that exhibits an undirected and overabundant

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An Essay on the Dialectics of the Living: Thomas Khurana 23productivity, that challenges and subverts ordering forms: it is that which must overcomeitself again and again.7

I am describing these two opposed intuitions concerning what is distinctive about livingprocesses as displaying a productive force or as having an eminent form in such a sketchyand eclectic way because I do not want to uphold either intuition against the other. Myassumption is rather that it is no accident that both opposed intuitions come up with regardto the specificity of living processes. The reason they recur is that the processes that we following the philosophical discourses around 1800 call living are processes inherentlymarked by a polarity of force and form. Living is what takes place within this polarity: adialectics of force and form. It is neither the sheer productive force nor the mere resultingform but a certain interrelation, to be more precise, a tension of force and form. That thedistinctive quality of the living depends on an interrelation of force and form can already besensed with regard to the intuitions I indicated above: the living forces I alluded to are forcesproductive of form; the organic form, on the other hand, is typically understood as beingengendered by and as disposing of forces.

In the following, I shall begin to explore the inner tension of living processes by inves-tigating what I will provisionally call a positive and a negative dialectics of force andform. What guides this investigation is the question as to how these dialectics succeed inaccounting for the irreducible tension of force and form that seems characteristic of the livingon my hypothesis. In order to give a paradigmatic expression of a positive dialectics andto highlight the fundamental danger that such a dialectics is confronted with, I will turn to abasic concept that was very prominent in the proto-biological and philosophical discoursesaround 1800: Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs concept of a nisus formativus, first introducedin writings around 1780. This formative drive is supposed to elucidate the peculiar formof living beings by postulating a force that lies at the ground of the actualization and mainte-nance of organic form. The relation of force and form that is implied in this proto-biologicalconception can be characterized as a positive dialectics to the extent that the formativedrive is aiming at a convergence of force and form. On account of this convergence and dueto an insufficient understanding of the inherent precariousness of living forms, this biologicalconcept faces the danger of reducing the dialectics between force and form to such an extentthat the specific living quality that resides in their tension is occluded.

I will therefore turn to a second paradigmatic articulation of the dialectics of force andform that is formulated at a much later point and with reference to a different field: Derridasconception of a force of meaning that is meant to elucidate the living character of poeticpractices. In his account, Derrida explicitly refers to the debate on preformationism andepigenesis into which Blumenbachs hypothesis of a formative drive intervened. He analyseshow poetic practices are understood by contemporary structuralists in the organicist termsintroduced around 1800 and criticizes the way in which the complex economy of force andform which is distinctive of the living is neglected in these descriptions. In contradistinction tothe positive dialectics epitomized by Blumenbach and still vital in contemporary aestheticdiscourses, Derrida delineates a negative and tense dialectics of force and form that isnecessary in order to grasp the peculiar living character of meaningful practices.

Although we will be dealing with two paradigms that seem to be historically and materiallydistant, I want to demonstrate that these paradigms are in fact marked by a shared conceptualproblem: the problem of accounting for the living dialectics between force and form. Thenegative dialectics, that can be drawn from Derridas account, can be understood as areflective rearticulation of the positive dialectics, exemplified by Blumenbachs conception:the negative dialectics relates to poetic practices and poetological discourses that reflect and



transpose the proto-biological conceptions, and it deepens the tension between force andform that is already implied and at the same time occluded by the positive dialectics.8

II. Nisus Formativus: Blumenbachs Positive DialecticsAn essential source for the widespread intuition that life is to be thought of in terms of aproductive force is the idea of vital forces common among biologists around 1800.9 Onefamous protagonist, already acknowledged and paid tribute to in the Critique of Judgment( 81), is Johann Friedrich Blumenbach with his influential concept of Bildungstrieb, aconcept with great repercussions in philosophical discourses and the aesthetics of his time.10This force, not only moving but productive, is also called nisus formativus, a formativedrive or impulse: it designates a vital force acting upon and imparting to matter a regularand definite form.11 It is consequently not a formless or transgressive force, but a force thatis internally related to form from the very beginning: it is the very source of organic forms,a postulated force supposed to render intelligible the generation, the maintenance and theregeneration of organic form.

It is astonishing how intimately force and form are connected in Blumenbachs definition,if one takes into account the intuitions tied to later philosophical and cultural appropriationsof vital forces as that which transgresses and overcomes form. The Bildungstrieb isdefined, according to a passage from Uber den Bildungstrieb (Nisus formativus) und seinenEinflu auf die Generation und Reproduction the short first presentation of Blumenbachsconcept from 1780 in the following way: Blumenbach states, there exists in all livingcreatures from men to maggots and from cedar trees to mold a particular inborn, lifelongactive drive (Trieb) to initially take on their determinate form (Gestalt), to preserve it and, ifthey become injured, to restore their form where possible.12 Defined in these terms, we cansee, that this drive or force is not the antagonist of form, but its source or generative medium.This postulated force unifies generation, nutrition and reproduction and reduces them to onecommon force,13 which is in its very source unknown, but can be inferred from its effects.14

Attractive as it might be that force and form are not to be understood in terms of an externalopposition, Blumenbachs account runs the danger of reducing their internal tension to sucha degree, that they begin to cover and occlude each other. I cannot do justice, at thispoint, to the way in which Blumenbach himself constantly reworks his concept and embedsit in a network of other vital forces. I just want to highlight a certain tendency that seemsproblematic in Blumenbach and his reception, especially with respect to the generalizationof the concept of a formative force with regard to the living character of the mind. In theway in which Blumenbach integrates force and form, there is the problematic tendency toconceive of this formative force (i) only with regard to its positive side, not with regard to theway it can be destructive of certain forms as a side effect of building others and (ii) as in itselftotally determinate, that is, as itself nearly a form. Due to the fact that the formative forcewas postulated a posteriori in order to make sense of existent forms one has encountered andwhich might seem inexplicable by means of mechanical laws alone, only existent, positiveforms are appraised as the effect of this force, not forms that have been excluded by itor forms that have been destroyed in transforming one form into another in the course ofdevelopment. Selectivity and metamorphosis, that is, are only developed and highlightedwith respect to their positive side. The process of life does not appear, as in Hegels wording,to be just as much an imparting of shape as a supersession of it.15 The specificity of theliving processes, thus, is not recognized in its quality of producing and transcending forms,form and its abandonment.


An Essay on the Dialectics of the Living: Thomas Khurana 25The second restrictive tendency present in Blumenbachs entanglement of force and form

and its reception by other authors the determinateness of the formative force becomesevident in the way Blumenbach deals with deviation from an expected form. I am referringhere particularly to his writings from 1780 and 1781 later on Blumenbach modified his viewmore and more, emphasized an inherent changeability of nature and accentuated the waysin which the formative drive can alter its direction.16 In the original formulation from 1780,however, Blumenbach writes: Even deformed animals do not derogate the determinatenessof this drive, as there is no reason, why it could not be displaced by accidental causes likeany other force and driven to take a deviating course.17 Even the production of variants Spielarten und Varietaten are explained by Blumenbach as due to external causes and notas an expression of the generative and productive force of his nisus formativus. Livingbodies, wrote Alexander von Humboldt along these lines, are those which in spite ofincessant attempts to alter their form, are hindered by a certain inner force from abandoningtheir first characteristic form.18 Re-stabilization, not variation, is the pre-eminent task ofthis formative force variations are left to other, outer forces and their forcible or violentefficacy.19 The conceptualization of the formative force, it seems, cannot comprise the wholeaspect of force present in the living processes and one pays a price for intimately connectingforce and form: a convergence of both that can come close to the mere tautology of theexplication of a phenomenon by a force.20

This problem is of interest to Blumenbachs endeavor insofar as the formative drive issupposed to offer a new account of generation, opposing the preformationist ideas dominantin Blumenbachs time. Blumenbach, himself previously a preformationist, now comes tooppose the idea that preformed germs pre-exist which contain, en miniature, all the livingorganisms from the beginning of time. Instead his hypothesis is that in the raw, unorganizedmatter of generation after having reached maturity and its place of destination, a . . . drivebecomes active, to initially take on its form.21 In order to account for the form of anorganism, Blumenbach does not want to take recourse to a germ that already contains thisform in an encapsulated manner that has merely to be developed and evolved. Instead theassumption of a formative drive is supposed to account for the way in which an organismepigenetically takes on its form. Against this background, it seems essential that the formativeforce is not identical with the mere shape that the specific organism eventually takes on otherwise the formative force is just another name for an unobservable preformed germ.My question consequently is, how and to what extent is Blumenbachs epigenetic thinkingin danger of being nothing more than a different form of preformationism, say, virtualpreformationism. Kant, astonishingly, uses this term of virtual preformation in order tocharacterize epigenetic thinking as such.22 On his account, the idea of epigenesis contains theidea of preformed species or stocks,23 so that the living beings are, although not individuallypreformed, still preformed virtualiter. Epigenetic thinking thereby stops postulating anactual presence of every single future form in the first moment, but argues for their generic orvirtual presence. Of course, much depends on how one reads the virtual and its implicatedvirtus or force that is substituted for a pre-given catalogue of forms. The expression virtuallypreformed on the one hand suggests that in some mode the forms are still thought to bepre-given; if one accentuates the virtuality of their putative pre-givenness on the other hand,all that seems to be given is a certain productive force.

However one chooses to read this virtual preformation, the decisive point for an epige-netic approach will be that the character of the living form being produced by a productiveforce has to be different from the type of form invoked by preformationist thought, if thenew conception is really to make a difference. It is of great importance especially if one



wants to understand the irreducible dialectics of force and form that the form resultingfrom a productive force cannot be an educt any longer, it has to be a product instead; itcannot be the instantiation of a pre-given type, it has to be a contingent form founded onits own having been produced, dependent on its own ability of instituting and reproducingitself. This peculiar type of form ought to find reflection in the sort of judgment adequate tograsp it. In this way, we might take Kants thought that the unifying form of a living beingis graspable only in a specific mode of cognition, the mode of a reflective judgment, as anindication of its peculiar character its being the effect of a formative force and not theactualization of a pregiven type.

If one entangles force and form and determines a force under the aspect of the form itproduces, one has to avoid representing the force itself in the guise of a form and one hasto be careful not to leave the notion of form untouched. Otherwise, one runs the risk thatthe dialectic disappears or remains external. Kants Critique of Judgment is instructive withrespect to the changed character of form. A natural purpose (Naturzweck), i.e. a livingbeing seen as a purposeful product of nature, is, in Kants description, an organized andself-organizing being organized insofar as the parts seem to be possible only throughtheir relation to the whole, and self-organizing insofar as its parts are combined into awhole by being reciprocally the cause and effect of their form. In this sense, the idea of thewhole determines the form and the relation of all parts not as a cause that is external tothe living being, given in the mind of its creator. [F]or then, Kant suggests, it would bea product of art. The wholeness of the living being rather seems to be given immanentlyin the self-organizing interaction of its parts. If we take recourse to the idea of the wholeas that which conversely determines the form and relation of the parts we should employthis idea only as a ground for the cognition of the systematic unity of the form and thecombination of all of the manifold.24 The idea of the whole is not in a way that we canestablish by experience or reason given as a guiding plan in advance that, as such, can beregarded as the objective cause. We rather impute this idea of the whole in order to approachthe self-referential unity of the organized being that we have problems to account for onits own terms: our discursive understanding is not equipped to adequately grasp the wayin which the parts are reciprocally cause and effect of one another and thereby produce awhole that determines them conversely a whole, as it were, that we can neither demonstrateto be a product of mere mechanical necessity, nor to be a function of a preceding idea inan understanding external to the living being. Kant is, thus, eager to make clear that theteleological model of a purposive production is only to be employed as a regulative principlefor our limited form of cognition and does not possess the status of a constitutive principle.To say it in a certain post-Kantian idiom, the idea of the whole, which is presupposed byour appraisal of something as a living organized unity, is a necessary theoretical fiction. Thistheoretical fiction is necessary inasmuch as the type of self-referential organization of theliving beings escapes our mechanical explanation and can only be approximated by treatingthem as if they were purposively created. This way of reflecting upon them, however, onlygives us an approximation of the lawfulness of the contingent25 that they exhibit. On Kantsaccount, the living being is in this sense marked by a surplus or excess of form beyond whatdiscursive thinking can accommodate, to take up a characterization by Jay Bernstein.26 Mycontention is that any form that is the effect of a formative force is marked by such an excessor surplus of form. The formative force is not to be equated with a preceding idea of thewhole, but rather a title for the self-organizing process of formation. In the surplus or excessof form and the difficulties in grasping it, a trace of the subversive potential of the forceremains that never just coincides with or terminates in a single thing-like form.


An Essay on the Dialectics of the Living: Thomas Khurana 27Such a tense relation of force and form, that is, according to my hypothesis, a structural

feature of modern philosophical notions of the living, is also the subject of an essay byJacques Derrida called Force and Signification. This essay reconstructs such a dialectics notwith regard to processes of biological formation, but with reference to poetic practices, acertain type of particularly living meaningful practices.

III. The Force of Meaning: Derridas Negative DialecticsDerridas 1963 essay Force and Signification, a critique of Jean Roussets Forme et sig-nification,27 first published in Critique and included as the opening essay in Lecriture etla difference, might seem to be an unlikely companion piece for Blumenbachs Uber denBildungstrieb. As we will see in the following, however, it presents an account of mean-ingful practices, paradigmatically poetic practices, in terms of the living and in termsof a complex relation of force and form. Derrida makes explicit use of the notions of or-ganism, preformationism, and epigenesis in order to characterize the dialectics of forceand form, implied in the linguistic practices under investigation which thereby appear tobe something living. The analysis of this relation does not start from a force that isobserved under the aspect of form (as it was the case with the formative drive); it re-verses the perspective and observes form under the aspect of force. What is more, thenature of the relation of both sides is different from Blumenbachs positive dialectics inwhich form and force eventually tend to converge. It is a negative dialectics, instead, thatpresents a very specific account of what living might mean in the case of meaningfulpractices.

Derrida elaborates this dialectics by means of a two-fold critique of a structuralist approachtowards poetic articulations which takes recourse to models of organic unity and form. Onthe one hand, Derrida rejects this structuralism on account of its neglect of a qualitative forceand an inherent temporality; on the other hand, he simultaneously defends the necessity andrigor of the formalist ideas presented in this structuralism against any positivism of force.By means of this two-fold strategy, he presents a tense negative dialectics of force and formthat renders poetic production to be the product of a very specific modality of life. Not ofa life in which a formative force realizes itself perfectly in its form for which the life ofBlumenbachs Bildungstrieb has become exemplary and not a life in which the positiveforce leaves every form behind the life of some kind of dionysic Nietzscheanism (or rather,its misunderstanding). It is a life in which the excess of form hints at a force that escapes ourgrasp and makes itself known primarily in the form of negative experiences. The practice ofmeaning is to be called living to the extent that it is subject to such a dialectics of forceand form. It is alive to the extent that its life is opened up to the experience of lifes other a life not merely opposed to its other (an experience of what Derrida has termed infinitefinitude28). This might seem enigmatic, yet I will try to elucidate it by outlining the pathwhereby Derrida tries to reach this conclusion.

The first move is, as I have indicated, a head-on critique of formalism. Jean RoussetsForme et signification is the main object of attack. In this work, Rousset presents structuralistreadings of Corneille, Marivaux, Proust, Claudel, and others, intending to present the formalautonomy of the[ir] work[s] an independent, absolute organism that is self-sufficient.29Derrida exposes the neglect of force in this structuralist analysis of poetic works that becomesapparent in its organicist and formalistic approach. One could say that this structuralistproject shares the intuition of the first option of delineating the living that I presented atthe beginning: that the signature of life is a special type of closed and self-referential form.



Poetic articulations, that is, have an organic character exceeding the instances of everydaymeaning on account of their specific form and wholeness. Derrida analyzes and criticizesthis organicist account of poetic articulations by relating it to the living forces apparentlyabsent in this account.

Roussets attempt to characterize the work as an organism, as a formal totality, presentsitself in the form of three guiding paradigms: geometrism, teleologism and preformationism,in Derridas terms. With regard to geometrism Derrida describes the ways in which Roussettries to find totality and organization in the works by neutralizing the thematic content andreducing the works to a set of figures and movements. Rousset confines himself to themechanics of meaning and never supplements it by means of an energetics.30 In lookingfor the formal unity of the work, in searching for its organism-like autonomy, in searchingfor its life, that is, Rousset stays with the geometry of the work, occluding any relevance offorce in the qualitative or intensive sense.

The second trait of this formal analysis that aims to establish the autonomous unity of thework is a kind of teleologism manifestly apparent in Roussets analysis of Marivaux. He triesto identify the structural fact of a double register proper to what he calls the true Marivauxand describes this organizing principle as a constant in his work. Every incident that doesnot harmonize with this essential structure is described counterfactually as not being properto the work. In Marivauxs early works, the true Marivaux is nearly totally absent, writesRousset.31 The disharmonious and disparate life of Marivauxs work, his peculiar force, asDerrida contends, is reduced by setting a teleological state of perfection and propriety thatgenerates the possibility of disregarding large parts of his meaning making practices as meredeviation.

The third face of Roussets specific biopoetics is preformationism. It becomes apparent,according to Derrida, in Roussets analysis of Proust, in which he tries to demonstrate theway in which beginning and end are encapsulated in each other and converge. Derrida aimsat the neglect of any kind of open becoming, of duration in Bergsons sense, when he callsRoussets approach preformationist and emphasizes that he borrows from the biologicalmodel: opposed to epigenesis, according to which the totality of hereditary characteristicsis enveloped in the germ, and is already in action in reduced dimensions that neverthelessrespect the forms and the proportions of the future adult.32 By means of this already-being-in-action, any duration is reduced and the force of the meaningful articulation is neutralized:time and becoming are annihilated in the convergence of beginning and end, while theproductive force is reduced to a simple actualization of a form given from the start.

The fundamental substructure of geometrism, teleologism and preformationism in thissense, is a certain metaphysics of time, in which the truth of temporality is not temporal,as Derrida writes. Simultaneity and eternity are the two main figures of the temporalityaimed at and implicit in the preformationist, the teleological and the geometric paradigms.The temps retrouvee in the Proustian constellation, for example, if interpreted as guidedby a preformationist ideal, is the attempt to get access to a former time and to bring out,through recollection, what is eternal in time. The search for the proper structure of the work,understood to be a constant throughout all the diverse temporal articulations of a work,shares this dream of atemporal forms. And the perspective adopted by the structuralist whotries to gain insight into the formal geometric unity of the work orients itself towards theideal of simultaneity, gathering all moments into one. This quest for the simultaneity of allparts of a work in fact not present on a simultaneous plane, but dispersed across time,growing out of each other and disappearing in one another explains Roussets fascinationwith spatial, topographical models for representing the unity of the work. He neglects what


An Essay on the Dialectics of the Living: Thomas Khurana 29Derrida assumes to be the temporality proper to living meaningful practices: the way inwhich they are articulated in irreducibly temporal forms.33

In insisting on the energy of meaning, its force, its undirected development and a complextemporality, Derrida seems to be straightforwardly criticizing Roussets idea of the life ofpoetic works as form. In his emphasis on intensity and force, on dispersion and becoming, onemight sense a model diametrically opposed to Roussets account. The life of the poetic workis force, he seems to say, not form. Derrida insists, however, that [o]ur intention. . .is not,through the simple motions of balancing, equilibration or overturning, to oppose durationto space, quality to quantity, force to form, the depth of meaning or value to the surfaceof figure.34 What he is after, is a new economy that eludes this system of metaphysicoppositions. This complex new economy is the attempt to think the life of poetic works asa process in which force can neither be reduced to form, nor can form be just consumed byforce. It is an economy of an irreducible and negative dialectics that produces an astonishingvitalism foreign to what one might expect of an emphasis on life commonly attributed toLebensphilosophie. I will try to give some hints as to the basic structure of this economyand try to elucidate in which way this vitalism thinks an essential lack of force that turns theseemingly stubborn structuralists under attack into authors allowing for essential insights.

The Derridean economy of force and form that characterizes meaningful practices worthyof the qualification living, is articulated in such a way, that force and form have anasymmetrical relation without belonging to different orders. The force Derrida talks aboutin this sense is the force of meaning,35 the energy is the living energy of meaning.36That is to say, Derridas project in relating meaningful forms to a momentum of force is notaiming at relating meaning and mind structurally or genealogically to bodily structures orforces heterogeneous to the order of meaning; instead, he describes the meaningful processesand events themselves in terms of something living. Derrida has described the process ofongoing articulation and institution of such a living meaningful practice, never closedand never coming to terms, by means of the quasi-concepts of differential articulation anditerability. This account is often understood to result in rendering determinate meaningmerely impossible: in accentuating a permanent displacement of meaning, there is a slide orsliding of signification, so to speak. If that were the case, Derrida would accentuate meaningas having the character of force at the cost of negating its instituting and reproducing offorms. I take Derrida, however, to be aiming at an account of the precariousness and inherentproductivity of meaningful forms, not intent on showing that they are ultimately prone todrown and to dissolve in the flux of differences. The essential move in this account of theprecarious and productive mode of being of forms is of course his concept of iterability.The elementary forms as well as the rules of composition of meaningful practices are notrelated to ideal types existing above or beyond the meaningful practices. The types and rulesare, to say it quite simply, dependent on actual operations of repetition: ideality originatesfrom possible repetition of a productive act,37 it depends on the possibilities of actsof repetition.38 That means that the types and rules are the immanent correlate of themeaningful practices themselves. The forms are consequently understood to be produced bythe acts of articulation. They are not educts, but products of a generative process.

The question now is, how is this process of articulation to be related to force. Is the processof articulation to be traced back to some kind of living force animating these practices? In avery specific sense an ultra-transcendental one, according to the early Derrida one can talkof an infrastructural level of forces articulated in the differentiating and differing movementof differance. But one misses the gist of this description if one thinks of substantial, agent-like forces that can be grasped or signified just like forms: By its very articulation force



is already phenomenon,39 that is, an instance of form. The force, the absence of whichDerrida has so vividly criticized in the account of Rousset, cannot appear as such. It is, again,as was the unified purposive whole in the case of Kant, a theoretical fiction, that leads usastray if we substantialize and reify it in too simple a manner. The strength of the structuralistaccount Derrida has dealt with in Force and Signification resides precisely in the fact thatby excluding force it refrains from reifying it and assimilating it to the realm of form. Thatis why it is Derridas starting point for his elaboration of an alternate economy of force andform. In presenting a totality abandoned by force, it can give a sense of the heterogeneity offorce and the difficulty of thinking it properly. It can do this precisely to the extent, that itgrasps meaning by losing its force. To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the formof a force, is to lose meaning by gaining it.40

What, then, is this force, so irreducibly necessary to meaningful practices, and yet alwaysso elusive when we remain on the level of forms? The force inheres in the precariousness andproductivity of the forms, that is, in their complex temporality. That implies that we cannotget hold of the force in the instant or the present but always only in what relates a presentto other times: in the way in which a present form is in excess of itself, differentially relatedto the other forms, preceding and following it and related to its own instances of actual orpossible repetition.

There are numerous ways in which the temporal excess can be marked in a present, but theyconverge in that they imply an element of negativity: a moment resisting the attempt to gatherthe excess in a closed and full present. Expositions of force of preeminent importance toDerridas notion of force are accordingly moments of withdrawal and remnants of its activity the remains or ruins of force. Paradoxically then, the force of meaning, indispensable formeaningful practices to be living, discloses itself, at least in part, in dead forms: in formsdeprived of clear meaning, either interrupted in their coming to action or abandoned leftovers,divested of force. Derrida suggests that the enigmatic quality of the concept of life hasto do with the fact that liveliness is internally linked to the nonlife. . .of the living.41 Therealm of the aesthetic, especially in its suspension and dissolution of forms of everyday life,in its intimate relation to sur-vival and afterlife, is one pre-eminent medium of reflection ofthis polarity of the living.

IV. Concluding RemarkInstead of further exploring the way in which under the heading of life or the living a dialectics of force and form has unfolded in philosophical discourses from the 18th centuryonward, up to the poststructuralist discourses of the past century, let me conclude with anattempt to formalize the constellation of these two paradigms.

If I am right in assuming that processes which we call living are characterized by a genuinedialectics of force and form, it is of the utmost importance that, on the one hand, the tensionbetween force and form is never completely eliminated and that, on the other hand, both sidesremain internal to each other and leave their mark on either side: that the form is the formof forces (produced by forces and organizing forces) and that the force cannot be thought ofindependently from form, but rather is a force of forms (producing forms and being itselfformed). Dialectics in this sense means essentially a relation of an intimate tension. In orderto grasp this dialectics one has to think the relation of force and form: the way in which theforce articulates itself in forms and the way in which the forms refer back to the potential ofa productive force. Taken as structural models, the virtual preformationism of Blumenbach


An Essay on the Dialectics of the Living: Thomas Khurana 31and the radically epigenetic approach of Derrida present two opposing models of thinkingthis relation: a relation of potential and actual as well as of general and particular.

(1) As indicated above, the force in Blumenbachs account seems to be assimilated to acertain type of form. If one is to characterize this force, one will determine a prototypeor archetype of the form implied in this force: the form it strives to realize. The eventualform is, in this sense, virtually preformed in the force. This preformation is thought insuch a way that the force remains the same conserves its own form throughoutall of its actualizations; and the content of any actual form is totally dependent on itsaccordance with the prototype or archetype implied in the formative force. The generalforce determines the common element that all specific forms that are their productsshare. The general force explains them and makes them intelligible precisely insofarthey share these common features. The specificity of this approach, with regard tosimilar concepts of the relation of potential/actual and general/particular, resides onlyin the fact that the general (the set of common features) is in this case not understoodas a mere type, a mere possibility, but rather as an active force (in Leibniz sense):[A]ctive force involves an entelechy, or an activity; it is half-way between a facultyand an action,42 it includes a certain effort or striving (conatus) and is led byitself to action without any need of assistance from the outside. Of course, everythingdepends on how to understand this striving and how this striving affects what is strivenfor. In the dominant understanding of the formative drive, the relation seems onlyinstrumental: the striving seems to be just a means to realize a pregiven form. Depictedin a crude way, the formative drive seems to be the mere sum of a) a general form andb) an inherent energy actualizing it.

(2) Derridas account of the force of meaning presents a different conception: a force thatcannot be reduced in its essential content to a form or type. The force, being that whichpropagates the articulation of forms, is radically different from its products. The formsare correspondingly not only of relevance in their being identical to an archetype orprototype, but in giving to a force a specific expression that can never be its finalform. That there is a force is demonstrated in the chain of generative acts, producingiterations and alterations of forms. The force does not remain one and the same throughall its actualizations; it ties a chain of forms together, but not by exposing a set ofcommon features, but by the differential articulation of forms.43 The force does notmake itself known as a prototype or archetype, as a common form, but as the differanceof forms. The specificity of this approach lies in the peculiar form of unity that it triesto grasp and a distinct explanatory concern. It not only attempts to make intelligibleeach singular form in its vertical relation to some form of generality, but to elucidatethe horizontal relations between these forms of how one gives way to the other.44The sort of unity that bears the title of force is not the unity of a form, an abstract orformal generality, but the unity of an articulation. With the name force a certain typeof elusive and nevertheless decisive unity is to be thought: the unity of a formative andtransformative process. Why should this form of unity be decisive? Because it is theform of a productive or generative unity that is an analogue of the unity of the mind.

Depicted in these formal terms, the two paradigms I have presented imply two opposingmodels of living processes that have imposed themselves as analogues of performances ofthe mind. Structurally speaking, both models can be described to be open to complementarydangers. The positive dialectics, exposed in Blumenbachs concept of a formative drive,



runs the risk of assimilating force to form and of bringing them into complete congruence.The negative dialectics seems open to the danger of radicalizing the tension in thinkingforce only as the absence of form and form only as the disappearance of force to such adegree that it might appear like an external relation of force and form. In order to attain aliving conception of life, however, both sides have to be held together, precisely in theirvery tension. In the above remarks, I have claimed that the first model in Blumenbachsversion falls prey to its danger, whereas the second model in its Derridean version seems tobe in a more reflected position: by taking into account the danger of a positive dialectics,the negative dialectics brings out the tension that the first model tends to efface, withoutseparating force and form totally. Thereby, it enables a deeper conception of the living: itaccounts for the irreducibility of the dialectics of force and form and the intimacy of theirtension.45

NOTES

1. See Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life. Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century GermanBiology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1; for the emergence of a new type of life sciencesee also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London & NewYork: Routledge, 2002), especially 245ff.

2. See G.W. Leibniz, New System and Associated Contemporary Texts, trans. and ed. R. S. Wool-house and Richard Francks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially 16, 48. For the complexand historically varying relations between machine and organism see Georges Canguilhem, Machine andOrganism, Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 4569.

3. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1977), 104ff.

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer (Cambridge, Mass.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000), 61, 5:360.

5. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), especiallyPart II, 115ff.

6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 559.7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None, ed. by Adrian del Caro

and Robert Pippin (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 88ff.8. For a conception of art as a form of reflective life see my Reflexives Leben: Biologie und Asthetik

um 1800, Texte zur Kunst 20 (2010), 177182 and Vita aesthetica. Szenarien asthetischer Lebendigkeit,ed. A. Avanessian, W. Menninghaus, and J. Volker (Berlin: diaphanes, 2009).

9. See James L. Larson, Vital Forces: Regulative Principles or Constitutive Agents? A Strategy inGerman Physiology, 17861802, ISIS 70 (1979), 235249.

10. Blumenbachs concept is explicitly taken up by Herder, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel as well asHolderlin, Goethe and Moritz. For an overview of the scope of the repercussions of Blumenbachs epigeneticthinking see Helmut Muller-Sievers, Self-Generation. Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997) and Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life.Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).

11. Larson, Vital Forces, 240.12. J. F. Blumenbach, Prof. Blumenbach uber den Bildungstrieb (Nisus formativus) und seinen Ein-

flu auf die Generation und Reproduction, Gottingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und der Litteratur,1. Jg. (1780), 247266.

13. See J. F. Blumenbach, Prof. Blumenbach uber den Bildungstrieb, 252.14. The word formative drive shall designate, as Blumenbach explains in the third edition of

Uber den Bildungstrieb (1789), a force. . .whose constant effect is known from experience, whose causehowever. . . for us is qualitas occulta (J. F. Blumenbach, Uber den Bildungstrieb (Gottingen: Dieterich,1789), 26). It is an object of debate, if Blumenbach himself understands this force as an heuristic andregulative principle or as a constitutive agent for this question see on the one hand Larson (Vital Forces)and Lenoir (Strategy of Life) and for the competing view, Robert Richards (Romantic Conception of Life,216ff.).

15. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 108.


An Essay on the Dialectics of the Living: Thomas Khurana 3316. See Blumenbach, Beytrage zur Naturgeschichte (Gottingen: Dieterich, 1790), 31. The 1789

edition of Uber den Bildungstrieb is also of interest: Blumenbach names three aberrations of the formativedrive that (i) might produce in one species forms proper to an other species, that (ii) might produce thesexual organs of one sex in the other and (iii) that might also take on a tendency wholly against nature andproduce monstrosities. Blumenbach remains confident, however, that even in these monstrous cases, nothingamorphous takes place: Whomever had the opportunity to compare a considerable number of deformedbeings cannot fail to acknowledge the conspicuous uniformity with which this or that monstrosity remainssimilar to itself except minor variations, so that the exemplars of such a kind seem to be formed from thesame mold (Blumenbach, Uber den Bildungstrieb, 104).

17. Blumenbach, Prof. Blumenbach uber den Bildungstrieb, 257.18. A. v. Humboldt, Aphorismen aus der chemischen Physiologie der Pflanzen (Leipzig: Voss 1794),

3 (See Larson, Vital Forces, 24344).19. See Blumenbach, Prof. Blumenbach uber den Bildungstrieb, 259.20. As Derrida formulates the point in connection with Hegel, in: Jacques Derrida, Force and

Signification, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 27.21. Blumenbach, Uber den Bildungstrieb, 24.22. The system of generatings as mere educts is called that of individual preformation or the theory

of evolution; the system of generatings as products is called the system of epigenesis. The latter can also becalled the system of generic preformation, since the productive capacity of the progenitor is still preformedin accordance with the internally purposive predispositions that were imparted to its stock, and thus thespecific form was preformed virtualiter (Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 81).

23. Peter McLaughlin argues that Blumenbachs theory of epigenesis also depends on the idea of thepreformation of the species see P. McLaughlin, Blumenbach und der Bildungstrieb. Zum Verhaltnis vonepigenetischer Embryologie und typologischem Artbegriff, Medizinhistorisches Journal 17, no. 4 (1982):357372.

24. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 65, 5:373.25. Ibid., 20:217.26. Jay M. Bernstein, Judging Life: From Beauty to Experience, from Kant to Chaim Soutine,

Constellations 7, no. 2, (2000): 157177.27. Jean Rousset, Forme et signification. Essais sur les structure litteraires de Corneille a` Claudel

(Paris: Libraire Jose Corti, 1962).28. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 99104; Jacques Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . .(Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 48 passim: [L]ife, which is undecidable, is also, in itsvery finitude, infinite. What has only one side a single edge without an opposite edge is in-finite. Finitebecause it has an edge on one side, but infinite because it has no opposable edge.

29. Derrida citing Rousset, in: Derrida, Force and Signification, 13; see Rousset, Forme et signifi-cation, xx: Madame Bovary constitue un organisme independant, un absolu qui se suffit a` lui-meme.

30. Derrida, Force and Signification, 16.31. Ibid., 21.32. Ibid., 2333. For an extended account on the temporality of meaning in Derrida, see Thomas Khurana, Sinn

und Gedachtnis. Die Zeitlichkeit des Sinns und die Figuren ihrer Reflexion (Munchen: Fink, 2007).34. Derrida, Force and Signification, 19.35. Ibid., 25: its [i.e.: meanings] force.36. Ibid., 5.37. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, 6, my emphasis.38. Ibid., 52, my emphasis.39. Derrida, Force and Signification, 2627, (French version: Quand elle est dite, la force est deja`

phenome`ne.) See Derrida, Differance, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress, 1982), 1718: Force itself is never present; it is only a play of differences and quantities. Therewould be no force in general without the difference between forces . . . [D]ifferance is the name we mightgive to the active, moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces.

40. Ibid., 26, translation modified (French version: Comprendre la structure dun devenir, la formedune force, cest perdre le sens en le gagnant).

41. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, 7.42. Leibniz, New System and Associated Contemporary Texts, 3233.43. For this type of unity without generality compare Christoph Menkes reconstruction of an

aesthetic concept of force in Herder: Christoph Menke, Kraft. Ein Grundbegriff asthetischer Anthropologie



(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008), 46ff.; see also Christoph Menke, Force. Toward an Aesthetic Conceptof Life, Modern Language Notes, Vol. 125, No. 3 (2010), 552570.

44. The price to pay for attending to this horizontal dimension is, of course, a certain complicationwith regard to the vertical dimension: the force cannot be determined by a set of common elements sharedby various singular forms which it produces. The generality implied in the force seems to be more of afamily resemblance: a twine that is made of a number of threads without any of them needing to go throughthe whole: And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And thestrength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but inthe overlapping of many fibres, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell,2003), 67.

45. I would like to thank Matthias Haase, Andrea Kern, Len Lawlor, Christoph Menke, Dirk Quad-flieg, Francesca Raimondi, Juliane Rebentisch and Dirk Setton for their helpful comments on an earlierdraft of this paper. I am indebted to Daniel Smyth for helping me with what is not my first language.

Thomas Khurana is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the Clusterof Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders at the Goethe-University, Frankfurtam Main. His publications include Die Dispersion des Unbewussten (Gieen, 2002); Latenz(Berlin, 2007; co-edited with S. Diekmann) and Sinn und Gedachtnis (Munchen, 2007).


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Force and Form-An Essay on the Dialectics of the Living